Modified from this Allrecipes version.

• 3/4 cup milk
• 3 Tbsp finely chopped fresh lavender, or 3 tsp dried lavender flowers
• 8 Tbsp butter, softened
• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• If, like me, you are a tool who has self-rising flour lying around, you can use that instead of the last three ingredients.

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Grease two smallish loaf pans thoroughly–this bread likes to stick.

Combine the milk and lavender in a small saucepan over medium heat. Raise to just barely a simmer–you are looking for tiny bubbles around the edges, but not a full boil–then remove from heat, and allow to cool some.

Cream together the butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in the eggs until the mixture is light and fluffy (I did this first with a spoon and did not achieve fluffiness, and it was sub-par. Use a mixer!)

Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt; alternate adding the dry ingredients and the lavender-milk to the creamed things until just blended. Pour/scrape into the prepared pans.

Bake for 35 minutes, or until a testing thing comes out clean. Cool pretty thoroughly in the pan before attempting to turn out onto a wire rack. When it’s cool, you can add a citrus glaze if you like. My last one was 1/4 cup powdered sugar / juice of about a third of a lemon / splash of vanilla, but this did not quite seem ideal.

You can find a pretty good transcript of the recipe here (but not quite complete, annoyingly), if you don’t have the cookbook. Note that you will also need her instructions on sauteing mushrooms (this one is a direct, complete copy) and brown-braising pearl onions (close enough), even if you think you know how to do these things.

Some notes:

• One of the best things about the original recipe is the detailed information on wine. It recommends pairing with “a fairly full-bodied, young red wine, such as Beaujolais, Côtes du Rhône, Bordeaux-St. Émilion, or Burgundy,” and using any of those or a Chianti to go into the stew.
• 3 cups of wine = 1 bottle. I doubled the recipe. Whoo!
• I bought pre-cut-up stew meat, some of which was cut a lot finer than the other, and on the whole big chunks worked a lot better for drying and browning.
• Conversely, I couldn’t find an unsliced chunk of bacon anywhere, and regular old thick-sliced seemed to work okay.
• I over-salted because I forgot, as always, to account for the massive amounts of salt in bouillon cubes. Use caution, or perhaps better beef stock.
• Blanching helps when you realize you have to peel 48 pearl onions.
• I couldn’t really get the sauce to thicken in the end, but it seemed to end up okay just letting it reduce a lot even if it never really reached light-spoon-coating consistency. =/

For extras, here is the rosemary bread recipe I have been fussing with of late. It’s sort of long but that’s because the procedure is the complicated part; sorry. Start this ~3 hrs before you want to eat it.

• 2 1/2 tsp yeast, which is~1 packet
• 2 c. warm water, ~110-115 F, which is warm but just shy of scalding
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 2 tsp salt
• 4 c. flour. Bread flour is nice if you can get it, and if you do not consider extra gluten cheating.
• 2 tsp. minced fresh rosemary plus more for topping. Fresh is important! You can sub out some for fresh thyme.
• olive oil, corn meal, sea salt

Dissolve yeast in the warm water and sugar. If it’s NOT instant/fast-acting/bread-machine yeast, give it <5 min to froth up. Otherwise, immediately add flour, salt, and 2 tsp rosemary and stir until blended. Do not knead! Cover and let rise for 1 hour or until double in size; bonus points for putting it someplace slightly warm and moist.

Oil a baking sheet and sprinkle with corn meal. Perhaps try oiling your hands instead of flouring them, as the dough is super sticky, then divide it in half, shape each half quickly and loosely into a round by tucking the edges under, and place on the baking sheet. Cover and let rise another hour. The stickiness is again a problem; cooking-sprayed plastic wrap is the only thing I’ve managed to use that DIDN’T stick horribly and make the top of my loaves lumpy.

With bread, some last-minute rising happens in the oven and for that you want things hot and steamy (har). Start heating your oven early, maybe half an hour into the second rise, to 450 or “lots.” My oven here has no numbers on the dial between 350 and 500 so I use my imagination, but I don’t think getting it too hot is a possibility. If you have a pizza stone, put it in now. Also put a cast-iron skillet in the bottom of the oven (or something else which can be raised to high temps empty, then have cool water thrown in it without exploding).

When bread is again about doubled in size, brush with olive oil and top with more rosemary and plentiful crushed sea salt. Get yourself some water, maybe 1/4 cup, on hand near your oven as now you must act quickly! Put the bread in (just stick the pan on the pizza stone if using one, unless you want to get fancy and try to slide the bread onto the stone directly), dump the water on your previously-heated skillet or whatever where it will send up exciting clouds of steam, and close the oven door quickly. Bake 10 min, adding more water for steam if it runs out. Then turn the oven down to 375 and bake another 20 min or so until it’s golden-browny.

• They are delicious! While they steam they emit this stunningly tasty broth. Look into it.
• They are cheap, esp. for seafood! $5/lb is the price for Manila clams down at the Berkeley Bowl, and that is definitely enough to feed two people.
• When you buy them… they are STILL ALIVE. Creepy, eh?

This is a very simple and traditional way to prepare them, and the most expensive part is the bottle of wine, of which only about 1/2 cup goes into the cooking… so you get to drink the remainder with dinner! Serves you + 1 fly honey.

Linguini with clams (basic)

• 1 lb small clams, such as Manilla or Littleneck (this should be about 2 dozen and a bit)
• fat (butter or oil), about 3-4 tablespoons
• 3 large cloves garlic, minced
• 1 small shallot (or 1/4 of a mild-tasting onion), minced
• 1/2 cup dry white wine (Kendall Jackson’s sauvignon blanc is a very good choice here and it’s inexpensive too)
• 2 tomatoes, peeled, cored, seeded, and diced
• 1/2 lb linguini

Melt the fat in a large pot on medium, add the minced garlic and shallot and sauté until fragrant and beginning to soften (about 2 minutes). Add the clams to the pot, the wine, and about half the diced tomatoes. Bring to a boil, then cover and let steam until the clams open (about 5-8 minutes). Meanwhile, cook the linguini to your desired specifications. Remove clams to a bowl (discarding any that do not open… that means they were dead when you got them :/) and cover with foil. Drain the linguini and throw it in the pot, which should have a nice thin layer of broth at the bottom. Throw in the remaining tomato and toss it all together over medium heat for a few beats. Serve the linguini with clams on top (either you can remove them from their shells or the diner can… your choice!) immediately.

This recipe of course begs for additions and variation. I was planning on tossing some arugula in as well, but my stock had gone extra-bitter so I decided against it. I also added some grated chestnuts as an experiment, but I do not recommend this, as chestnuts are a pain in the ass to prepare and they didn’t add much to the dish.

Ciabatta - Fix a starter of 1 cup flour, 2/3 cup water and a pinch of yeast and chill for 12 hours. It will become turn bubbly and spounge-ish.  To begin making Christmas dough, add 2 cups flour, 1.5 teaspoons of salt, a measure of yeast in warm milk and about half a cup of water. For points, use a food processor to blend everything together. This sounds weird but works remarkably well! The processor makes every gluteney but if you don’t have one or enjoy being traditional: kneed, quarter turn, etc, until just prior to your arms falling off. Let rise for 90 minutes-ish. If you enjoy having larger bubbles in your bread, add a tablespoon of oil to the mixture. There were Experiments last night and we discovered this.

After rising, form two long, flat loaves. It shouldn’t need to be fooled with too much but punching it down helps. I also like to throw cornmeal on the tray before I transfer the loaves. Let rise for a slight bit more, then cook at 400′ F for 20 minutes.  You should get two well rounded ciabatta with a thin, golden crust and a fluffy interior.  Did you know ciabatta means ’slippers’? I did not!

Vinaigrette- Add freshly pressed garlic, salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar, sugar, mustard and slight amounts of olive oil together. The consistency should be thick & syrupy. The secret is more sugar and less wet ingredients compared to one you’d make for a salad. I suggest making lots of this and keeping it about the house . By about the house, I really mean Securely in the Refrigerator.

Slice a loaf in two and drizze the vinaigrette on both sides, add lots of pepper, a little bit of salt and chopped basil. If it smells good, you’re doing it right! Add prosciutto, a soft mozzarella and if you both wish to be traditional and enjoy tomatoes, which I do not, slice & add one!

You now have a sandwich! You win! There’s a particular name for the vinaigrette, mozzarella, tomato & basil combination but it eludes be just now. Carefully piling the Tomato/mozzarella/basil together without bread or prosciutto will create a simple & elegant appetizer-salad thing.

rosemary bread yet again

First I baked rosemary bread yet again, for a dinner party, following this recipe for an unkneaded peasant bread. This time it came out much much lighter, fluffier, and more delicious. Basically I followed the directions more carefully and this worked (who knew!) although I also stuck my roommate’s pizza stone in the oven while it was preheating, then stuck the bread pan right on top of it to while baking, which may have helped.

I infused some olive oil with garlic and left-over fresh rosemary while it was baking, too, for dipping purposes. This was a good idea.

mm breakfast!

Hungry grad students ate all my bread at once, so the next day I made scones, using my current favorite recipe (via Smitten Kitchen, with modifications here), only lemon-zest-and-cranberry this time (I had no oranges). A nice thing I’d forgotten about this recipe is it involves no eggs, except for the glaze, so licking the spoon is completely acceptable.

Finally, I made tomatoes filled with rice again (for the third time!) and yet again, they were devoured before photographic evidence could be acquired. You’ll just have to trust me on them.

Here's the bread rising, looking bizarre

Both times I’ve made the loaf I have had to add a little bit of water after the kneading process, but not a huge amount..  The bread tastes pretty good by itself. It is sweet, but not overly strawberry flavored. I find that it actually tastes more strawberry-like when it’s made into french toast, but even then don’t expect to be hit with an intense strawberry flavor. It’s very subtle (but delicious!)

For french toast, I recommend cutting the loaf into about 12 slices for thick-but-not-too-thick french toast.  I admit that I don’t follow an exact recipe for french toast, but the basic gist of it is to warm up a griddle or frying pan (be sure you have some kind of substance to help the french toast not stick – butter, pam, whatever..)  I usually soak the bread in a mixture of eggs,  milk, vanilla and cinnamon until it is saturated – but not excessively dripping.  The strawberry bread is very dense, so it helps if you poke the bread a few times with a fork while soaking to let it go all the way through. Then cook the bread on the heated surface until it’s golden brown (and not dripping liquid ).    Top with maple syrup or strawberries and whipped cream or even just a little pat of butter… and enjoy!

Recipe from the back of the whole-wheat King Arthur Flour – I’d heard good reviews of it even though it does things I normally feel like are cheating, such as add oil and honey – with my comments in bold:

• 2 1/2 tsp instant yeast OR the equivalent in active dry yeast dissolved in 2 Tbs warm water
• 3 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 1/4 tsp salt
  
• 1/4 cup honey, molasses, or maple syrup * I used honey
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil * I used olive oil – olives are not unlike vegetables?
• 1 1/3 cups lukewarm water
• 1/4 cup nonfat dried milk * Having no dry milk, I used 1/4 cup (cold) nonfat milk, then filled it up to 1 1/3 cups with warm water.
• ~1/2 cup dried cranberries
  
• (~1/2 cup walnuts)
  

Combine all ingredients; stir till it starts to come together, then knead 6-8 minutes. Cover & let rise ~60 min or till nearly doubled.

Shape – I made two boules instead because I have no bread pan – into an 8-inch log and transfer to lightly greased 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 loaf pan. Cover again and let rise 30-60 min; preheat the oven during this time to 350F (or 400F, if you want to go for the oven spring, in which case turn oven down to 350 after ~10min.)

Bake about 40min, tenting lightly with aluminum foil (if you’re using the loaf pan) after 20min. Test for doneness by thumping the bottom of the loaf – it should sound hollow (<- pretty ingenious, no?) Remove from pan and cool before cutting.

I brushed some butter on top while it was still warm to add richness, since we were already cheating some (HONEY). Either I should’ve baked it a little longer, or should’ve tossed in some vinegar to make crust crunchier, I think. Otherwise I really wish it had walnuts in like those rolls, but it’s tasty nonetheless. The honey balances out the cranberries and, as proclaimed on the bag, the whole wheat does indeed have a “delightfully nutty flavour.” Thanks, flour!

I followed Sophie’s Rosemary Bread guide but mine is simply  ….. Bread, now that said plant is dead. Long live the rosemary.

Once Active-Dry and Instant yeast make sense the world is a better place. Dough rises quickly and just like magic! I broke the incredibly fluffy dough into two boules but fear they were slightly crushed in the process. After rising, the dough was incredibly light, butthe consistency was almost dense while I preheated the oven.  *Shrug* Perhaps that settling is normal?? Everything continued to rise nicely while baking and looked like Christmas morning after half an hour, only covered in sea salt and edible.

I added salt on top of the dough after I formed the loaves rather than with olive oil after baking. Some salt dissolves, leaving a thin, sea-spray layer of flavor throughout the crust as well as in the crystals. I’m not sure which I prefer yet.

There were slight irregularities in the shape of the loaves, probably due to small creases in the dough that I had not properly folded over. At one point, the crust slightly separated slightly; again, likely due to an air bubble, crease, gremlins, etc. The consistency was very reminiscent of Macaroni Grill Bread, which is about everything I was hoping for. The flavor was slightly bland, which is easily correctable by reanimating/finding another rosemary plant, and in the immediate sense, fixed by using excessive amounts of olive oil, basalmic vinegar, salt & pepper. This was a triumph, my roommate agrees. We’re honest about our cooking, here. I’m also one step closer to self sufficiency in the event of the zombie apocalypse.

Bread Boules. Slicing the top turned out better than expected.

Bread!

It's art, guys.

For bonus points, feed this bread to starving graduate students and feel particularly good about yourself!

Only things I changed: clearly I don’t have a fancy mixer so I hand-mixed (had to actually use hands, not a spoon, for a minute to get the dough all together); dried rosemary because I had no fresh on hand, and so I tossed in a bit more; olive oil for melted butter brushed on the top; and because I was still using up the instant yeast, I just let it rise 1 hour in the bowl + 30min after shaping while the oven heated.

You will need:

• 1 cup warm (c. 110-115 degrees F) water
• 1 1/2 Tbs olive oil; also some more olive oil later
• 1 1/2 tsp sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp oregano
• 1/4 tsp ground black pepper
• 1 Tbs dried rosemary (fresh is fine too; just use a bit more)
• 2 1/2 cups bread (or all-purpose) flour
• 1 1/2 tps (aka one packet)

So, a word about yeast. It comes in two principle kinds, ‘active dry’ and ‘instant’/'rapid rise.’ There is also non-dried (’live’) yeast, which is creepy, and … some other denominations that are confusing, but you probably only have to care about those. If you bake bread lots, you might want to get yeast in a jar which you keep in the fridge and measure 1 1/2 tsp out of whenever you want, instead of going through tons of those packets. Active dry yeast needs to be proofed to start it making delicious bubbles – that is, mixed with some warm water and let to sit for 5-10min until it turns creamy and foamy and starts smelling like, well, yeast. “Warm water” here means ~100-115 degrees F, or, according to the ancient lore of my mother, the temperature of ‘baby’s bathwater’ – also according to ancient lore, this temperature is defined as “feels nice and warm on the inside of your wrist but just shy of scalding” – a useful trick if you are like me and never have a thermometer.

Instant/rapid rise yeast, however, should not be proofed! If you do, because it rises so very rapidly, all the bubble-making potential will likely get used up during the proofing process before it even meets the flour and you will have dense, sad bread. (This happened to me last time. The Bronx does not appear to sell regular yeast, alas.) If you have instant yeast, just toss it in with the other dry ingredients. Also, with instant yeast, you don’t usually want to give it two long rises. A regular pattern for non-quick bread might be: knead, rise 1 hour or till double size, punch down and knead, another hour rise, punch down and shape or put in pan, 20min / while the oven is heating rise. So with instant yeast you would only do one hour-long rise, then punch down, knead, shape, and let rise only another 20min before baking. But the rest of this recipe will assume you have regular old active dry yeast.

ANYWAY. So take 1/4 c of your water and add the active dry yeast, stir till dissolved, and let sit about 7 min. If it gets frothy and creamy in this time you are good to go.

Meanwhile, sift together (read, for me: stir with a fork or pastry blender) flour, sugar, salt, and stir in about 1.5 Tbs olive oil in a big bowl. The original recipe called for 3 Tbs olive oil which is way too moist and dense in my opinion; 1.5 seems to about do it, but it’s a matter of taste. You can substitute whole wheat flour for healthier bread, but I wouldn’t substitute more than a cup at the most, otherwise (again) it gets to dense, since whole wheat is inevitably heavier. If you’re using all-purpose flour instead of bread flour a half-cup of wheat to 2 cups of white flour is a nice balance.

Add yeast mixture, the rest of the water (warm!), and stir till it’s more or less coagulated. It will be a mess, however. This is the sign that you need to stick your hands in it.

Skip this paragraph if you already know how to knead things. But because some of you were asking about it: first, flour your board / counter-top. A nice way to do this is sort of tossing flour across the surface. The dough will start out sticky and falling apart. Do not worry about this; dust your hands in some flour and accept that you will make a mess of yourself and your counter (aprons are good at this point, though). At first worry about getting it all in a ball, but then you’re basically folding the dough-lump in half, squashing it away from you with the heels of your hands, folding it in half the OTHER way, and repeating. The kneading is to build up strands of gluten which make the bread tasty and nutritious, give it an even crumb (aka a cross-section with lots of little holes), and help it be springy and resilient, so as you knead, the dough will start to feel less goopy and uncohered, and smoother and easier to handle. There is a danger in over-kneading, however, because it will make the dough too tough, so you want to quit when the dough starts feeling good. In most cases each kneading will go for 5-10min, at which point your forearms may be sad, but remember that it’s all in the name of science.

So knead the dough for a minute, then add the oregano, pepper, and rosemary, and continue kneading for another 5min or so. Kneading the herbs in instead of mixing them in with the dry ingredients can be a pain, but 1. it’s also kind of fun, and 2. sometimes it makes nice swirly patterns of herbs in the final product. Studies show, however, that you could have just throw them in when you sifted the dry ingredients and it wouldn’t hurt.

Shape the dough into a round, put in a greased (with that olive oil, ideally) bowl in a warm, dark place, cover it, and let it rise for an hour or until doubled in size.

Punch down, knead another c.5min, shape again, re-cover and put it back in that warm, dark place for another hour.

After an hour, start preheating your oven for 400F. At this point you must ask yourself two questions: 1. How much do I care about “oven lift”? and 2. Do I own a clean spray-bottle full of water? Oven spring is how much the bread puffs up in the oven, especially at first, and one way to encourage it is by putting the bread into a humid and extra-hot oven for the first few minutes. The easiest way of doing that is the noble spray bottle (also the most fun way). Another option is to dig out an oven-proof bowl, fill it at least 2/3 with water, and stick it in before you start heating the oven. Make sure you put it in when the oven is cold to prevent shattered glass (if you’re usuing pyrex) or other disaster!

Take your dough again and shape it however you want. For this recipe, I usually form it into a round or two smaller ones. If you’re doing that, make sure to tuck the edges under and pinch them together to make a smooth, unbroken top to the round. It will come out somewhat boule-like. It’s also nice to slice the top at this point. Take your sharpest knife or a razor blade if you have one around and make a couple parallel long, shallow, swift cuts across the top. This took me a long time to get down, because you can’t make them too deep, but you want them to go across the entirety of the bread or they won’t sort of swell outward and look delicious. Also you really do have to go fast or it won’t work.

Let your bread rise for another c. 20min while the oven is pre-heating, then slide it in. When you put the bread in, if you’re taking the spray-bottle approach, have that at the ready and squirt it furiously into the hot oven (this makes a good noise) before slamming the door shut. Wait about 10min, then turn the heat down to 375 and, if you went that route, take out the bowl of hot water (caution: REALLY disastrously hot). Let bake another c. 20min or until nice and brown.

Take the bread out and brush top with olive oil (or butter, if you’re a wuss) while still hot, then sprinkle with coarse sea salt for more ‘tastes like Macaroni Grill’ points.

Et voila! This bread is pretty dense and moist, but very flavorful, too. I make it when I want something more show-off-y than a regular baguette.

This account of it is long only because I included all the bread-making trivia one might want – it is actually not any more complicated than most bread. The original recipe, you may note, is for a bread machine, so I had to extrapolate the process, but armed with general bread-making knowledge you can make anything you’d like by hand.